[cardigan]

Posting Nat Friedman's tweets here so they're easier to read - they're doing more than most companies about the whole thing, not sure where the vitriol in these comments is coming from:

It is painful for me to hear how trade restrictions have hurt people. We have gone to great lengths to do no more than what is required by the law, but of course people are still affected. GitHub is subject to US trade law, just like any company that does business in the US.

To comply with US sanctions, we unfortunately had to implement new restrictions on private repos and paid accounts in Iran, Syria, and Crimea.

Public repos remain available to developers everywhere – open source repos are NOT affected.

The restrictions are based on place of residence and location, not on nationality or heritage. If someone was flagged in error, they can fill out a form to get the restrictions lifted on their account within hours.

Users with restricted private repos can also choose to make them public. Our understanding of the law does not give us the option to give anyone advance notice of restrictions.

We're not doing this because we want to; we're doing it because we have to. GitHub will continue to advocate vigorously with governments around the world for policies that protect software developers and the global open source community.

[hkai]

It's crazy how Trump imposed these restrictions against innocent people and got away with it.

[cardigan]

It's the nature of economic sanctions that there are real people's livelihoods which are directly affected. That happens with all economic sanctions... nothing unique about this one

[mrtksn]

I don’t think that it would have been different if someone else was the president. Pre-Trump I had a vacation in Cuba and since I knew that the internet is a luxury there I made Spanish available offline on Google Translate. Works great, then I made the mistake to launch the app when I hade one hour access to the internet in Havana and puff translate is gone. I’m not allowed to use it there. That surely destroyed the communists.